In Press : The Future of Prejudice ; Applications of Psychoanalytic Understanding

toward its Prevention, Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Please do not copy or quote

without permission of one of the authors

THE PREJUDICES OF EVERYDAY LIFE WITH OBSERVATIONS FROM

FIELD TRIALS

By

Stuart W. Twemlow, MD

Professor of Psychiatry, Menninger Department of Psychiatry, Baylor College of

Medicine, Houston, Texas, Director Peaceful Schools and Communities Project and

Medical Director, HOPE program, The Menninger Clinic, Houston, Texas.

Frank Sacco, PhD

President, Community Services Institute, Springfield and Boston, Massachusetts,

Western New England College

Correspondence and Reprint Requests to:

Stuart W. Twemlow, MD Professor of Psychiatry Menninger Dept Psychiatry Baylor College Medicine 2801 Gessner Drive PO Box 809045 Houston, Texas 77280-9045 713-275-5436 (Office) 713-275-5488 (Fax)

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stwemlow@aol.com (private) stwemlow@menninger.edu (office) Introduction In this paper we will outline a theory of the evolution of prejudice from everyday

experiences, derived from our observations during field trials of psychodynamic

interventions applying the concepts of mentalization and the understanding of power

dynamics in complex social systems (Twemlow, Fonagy, Sacco, 2005 a & b). Although

lip service is often paid acknowledging the omnipresence of everyday prejudices, our

feeling is that attention to this natural crucible is often overlooked because everyday

prejudices are not dramatic or grossly offensive. They generally involve preferences

rather than prejudices such as for kinds of food, entertainment, and choice of vacation or

other commonplace events. Certainly people joke that their partner might be prejudiced

against certain places or foods, but it is not a serious hateful judgment. No one is

categorically hostile (Allport, 1954); with mindless expressions of their cultural, group,

and individual identity; instead most of us grow up reflecting and reacting against the

generations that came before us. In previous work on terrorism (Twemlow & Sacco,

2000), we suggested that terrorism (an ultimate form of prejudice) may be an outgrowth

of social activism and other less pathological forms of fanaticism. In the same fashion,

malignant prejudices might be on a continuum with normal behaviors such as personal

preferences and everyday prejudices. When prejudice is being considered, it may be

easier to work with a continuum in mind rather than absolutes, cultural mandates, and

rigid group rules. Reducing demonization of prejudice might help reduce overall

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prejudice by opening up more opportunities for dialogue about less threatening, shared

everyday biases and prejudices, in contrast to sensitive issues such as race, politics,

religion, sex, and socioeconomic class.

Prejudice functions as a power dynamic involving a coercive victimizing force

and a stigmatized victim located within a social context of bystanders. The content of the

prejudice may be difficult to contain, so that addressing the underlying power dynamic,

we argue, gets closer to the source of the longer-term social problems. Addressing the

power dynamics can re-direct energy away from content which is usually the sum total of

a person’s individual and cultural history (Volkan, 1999). Change might begin or might

be possible when power is addressed and drained of needless coercion, and is focused on

the cause (the threatening power dynamic), rather than a manifestation or result of the

threat, e.g., race.

Thus, everyday institutionalized prejudices co-exist with their more

malignant counterparts derived from racism, gender hostility, ethnic hatred, bullying, and

political oppression. Our first example comes from the Peaceful Schools project,

(Fonagy, et al, 2004; Twemlow et al, 2005a; Twemlow, et al, 2005b); an intervention

using psychodynamic principles in a controlled experiment with three elementary schools

and then a three-year randomized, controlled trial in nine schools. The power dynamics

of bully-victim-bystander were translated into a K-5 effective intervention. The second

example describes a new approach using this model in the developing country of

Jamaica, where a history of colonial enslavement has created extreme institutionalized

prejudice and a culture of violence (Twemlow. & Sacco, 1996). The third is a city wide

intervention in an affluent mainly Caucasian city, where an solution to the problem of

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maintaining the pure affluent culture invited aggression in high school students and

community fragmentation, with parents colluding, by their abdicating bystander role and

class struggles related to overvaluation of competition, with intoxicated students in

hazing younger students. These students were propelled onto the national stage as a result

of a drunken hazing incident that embarrassed this otherwise “perfect” suburban town.

In his classic work, “The nature of prejudice,” Gordon Allport (1954)

introduced the social science and cultural viewpoint into what then was a heavily

psychoanalytically oriented approach to prejudice , focused solely on explanations from

within the individual. As Allport noted, prejudice is a term whose meaning has evolved

from prejudgment—a judgment not based on sufficient knowledge—to an emphasis on

hastiness, and in more recent usage, the emotional element of favorableness or

unfavorableness was added. Negative prejudice, ie hating rather than overvaluing the

object of prejudice, is the focus of this paper.

Commonly held prejudices devolve from stigma, i.e., the ways people are marked

by actual disorder or disfigurement, and social conventions that define the stigma (Jones,

et al, 1984) provide a useful way of defining dimensions of stigmatizing conditions: (1)

concealability, e.g., facial disfigurement; (2) progression, that is, whether the disability

becomes progressive, e.g., multiple sclerosis; (3) disruptiveness, does the stigma interfere

with ordinary interactions, e.g., stuttering; (4) aesthetics, that is, how unattractive is the

stigma, for example, scarring; (5) how dangerous is it, for example, AIDS, to which we

would add (6) stigma by irrational social convention, e.g., racial, religious, gender, etc.

It hardly needs noting to a psychoanalytic audience that prejudice, like all

symptoms, has adaptive and defensive aspects referred to by different names in the

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behavioral and social sciences literature. Authors such as Crocker, et al 1998, observe

that stigmatizing others can serve several positive functions for an individual, including

self-esteem enhancement, enhancement of a feeling of self-control, and anxiety buffering.

For example, people may feel better if they are more fortunate than others who are

stigmatized, leading to a self-esteem boost. Bandura (1999), in his theory of moral

agency, outlines ways in which people can use their prejudices and reactions to stigma to

live with it without anxiety. This includes minimizing one’s role in causing the harm or

being responsible for the harm caused by the prejudice, where the prejudiced behavior is

portrayed as serving some higher moral purpose, for the greater good of others, for

example. Euphemistic labeling is often used in periods of war when certain actions would

be considered, in peacetime, serious crimes. Bandura (1999) posits a theory from social

psychology involving “advantageous comparisons,” in which a negative act is made to

seem less negative by comparing it to something worse; for example, in wartime, the loss

of a few lives of the enemy to protective larger numbers of other innocent

civilians,makes killing seems less destructive. Studies by Hymel et al (2005) suggest that

such attitudes are also seen in school bullying, when students who bully others are able to

live without anxiety because they maintain a mindset that the victim “deserves it.”

A Theory of Prejudice and Stigma from the Perspective of Power Dynamics and

Mentalization

From our perspective there are two stable and invariant false ideas, which are at

the core of the prejudice:

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1. That the object of the prejudice, the stigmatized individual, will by his or her mere

presence threaten those whose actions and attitudes are prejudicial. Threat is, in our

opinion, the final common denominator of the prejudice, although its phenotype may

have protean forms and origins. The following are a few examplers of such threat

although not an exhaustive list : threat to the purity of the omnipotent narcissistic self

image Grunberger (1989) defined purity as the opposite of contamination, “a narcissistic

idea of omnipotence and absolute sovereignty (well being) that is completely free from

the instinctual dimension” (pg 91). Threat can also have transference meanings; a most

intriguing example of which was described by Bird (1957) in which, during an analysis a

patient formerly not considered racially prejudiced developed an “attack of racial

prejudice” against black men. This intense prejudice was analyzed as a defense against

strong, irresistible erotic transference feelings, with the aggressive element structured

within the prejudice, which was that black men are envious and inferior and will try to

elevate themselves by raping white women. Analysis of these unconscious feelings

resolved the “temporary prejudice.”, so that the analysand realized that her rage to the

analyst was avoided by displacement onto “black men”. If such a case can illuminate

more general prejudices it would suggest that the threat stems from unacceptable

impulses, which are held and hidden within the prejudice as long as the object of the

prejudice either complies (the master-slave relationship), or is coerced and forcibly

contained (as with the Nazis).

Threat also underpins in-group and out-group phenomena as seen in social cliques

and in cults. Allport 1954, Twemlow and Hough, 2006, show how the leaders of cults

often make use of the threatening out-group to provide cohesion and unify the cult group

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members around their clarion call. Erik Erikson and his son Kai Erikson argued back and

forth about how healthy and pathological social groups are formed (Friedman, 1999).

Erik Erikson put forth the idea of pseudospeciation, which Kai Erikson preferred to call

psychosocial speciation. Kai, believed that healthy social groups went through

pathological phases. For Erik Erikson, however, “the pseudo in the speciation was its

defensiveness a combination of prejudices, illusions and suspicions in regard to one’s

own human kind and to other kinds” (pg 443). Erickson later influenced Robert Jay

Lifton to use the idea of pseudospeciation in his well-known treatise on the Nazi doctors.

From this perspective, the ideas held about the out-group are illusions defending the

fragile cohesiveness of the in-group.

How does threat create the prejudicial attitude? Threat (perceived danger) creates

a constant power dynamic between the threatened (the individual with the prejudice) and

the threatening (the object of prejudice). This victim- victimizer dialectic is co-created,

in the sense that neither can exist without the other and each is locked with each other in

a perverse stereotyped way, gaining a form of social identity and reality through the

existence of the other. This mindset, strongly influenced by parasympathetic and

sympathetic humorally influenced factors, creates several maladaptive cognitions that

interfere with accurate assessment of self and other (mentalizing), and reality testing:

denial of similarities, a tendency to over generalize and apply one solution to all, which

can lead to serious misjudgment of the victimizer, over simplification of solutions to the

problem, stereotyped response patterns, for example, the endless and repetitive use of

force to deal with the out-group in spite of the failure of force on numerous prior

occasions.

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2. The second false idea is that eliminating the object of prejudice will eliminate

the threat. Instead, repeated experience suggests that it hurts the cause and destroys social

stability. This avenging victim mindset often leads to lethal actions of prejudiced groups,

such as Klu Klux Klan. In our work (Twemlow et al, 2002), with the recent spate of

school homicides perpetrated by adolescent Caucasian males, we found that an avenging

victim mindset is accompanied, in some cases, by an extraordinary range of prejudices

that would be humorous if the circumstances were not so tragic. As Eric Harris of the

Columbine massacre said; “We hate niggers and spics, lets not forget you white POS

(pieces of shit), also the rich, the poor, all races and racism, fitness fuckheads, martial arts

experts, people who try to impress others by bragging about their cars, Star Wars fans,

people who mispronounce words, people who drive slow in a fast lane.”

Thus, if an intervention is focused on the form of the prejudice, for example

promoting tolerance for racial differences, mental illness, religion, and gender, the

intervention inevitably will be a failure, unless the threat is also dealt with. The form of

the prejudice always hides a much more deep-seated power dynamic. We know that

power struggles can help establish social order. Wrangham’s (2004) work with

dominance hierarchies in gorilla colonies and DeWaal’s , (1989) researches on social

order in chimpanzees are good examples. Fighting stops when the winner assumes a

socially acknowledged leadership position. What makes the power struggle destructive to

social order? The answer to this question might also shed light on how an everyday

prejudice becomes malignant and thus socially destructive.

Freud noted that the narcissism of minor difference is a way in which individuals

can establish a sense of self by exaggerating small differences from others. For example a

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child, proud that his parents rewarded his excellence in school by hiring a special coach

to make him a better football player, boasts about it at school. A poor child hearing this

boast feels discriminated against, yet the parents had a good reason for such a reward to

assist the boys self esteem and reward his excellent school performance.

The evolution of everyday prejudices into malignant ones is signaled by role

fixation (the roles of victim and victimizer become fixed), and the impact of the

bystander group, whose indirect facilitation of the victimization fans the flames of the

spiraling interaction. Our research in school systems (Vernberg et al, in preparation)

illustrates that 20 to 40% of children in schools get vicarious satisfaction out of observing

pain inflicted on others (the bully bystander or aggressive bystander). With role fixation

hope is lost and the view of the victimized individual narrows and becomes highly

defensive. If coercion and humiliation are added to this equation, there is an increase in

the degree of malignancy. Conversely if the role of victim and victimizer can be kept

flexible the prejudice is likely to remain more benign. This process is summarized in

Table 1.

INSERT TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE

The instability of communities fragmented by power dynamics and power struggles

allows prejudice and stigma to constellate around many issues, with often surrealistic, if

not unbelievable, qualities. A mother in a small town in Texas felt so stigmatized that her

daughter did not receive a spot on the cheerleading team she hired a hit man to kill her

next door neighbor and her next door neighbor’s daughter, who had been elected co-

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captain of the team. The solicited hit man was an FBI agent, and the mother was arrested,

but a movie was made, the mother served only a few months due to technical errors in

jury selection, and she later retained a joint custody arrangement with her children. As

one commentator pointed out, if it was the father charged, it is unlikely he would have

been found fit to have joint custody ( Maier, 1992).

Mentalization is also a critical part of this conversion from everyday to

malignant prejudice. Since there is an inverse relationship between mentalizing and

power dynamics, a non-mentalizing community is stuck with social instability and

fragmentation, since it can’t sufficiently reflect either individually or as a group, to see

the point of view of others well enough to arrive at solutions and compromises. From a

psychobiological perspective mentalization creates a social environment incompatible

with interpersonally aggressive violent behavior (Fonagy, et al, 2002). In general, social

systems that are incompatible with violence are mentalizing because, from an

evolutionary point of view, individuals are incapable of exercising interpersonal

aggression in a context in which they successfully mentalize their victim. Except, when

survival of the system requires non-sadistic collaborative fighting, e.g., for defense or

food. When the social system becomes coercive as in the three examples to be described,

all the players in the social game share a common characteristic: their individuality has

been subsumed in favor of the social role, which group pressure forces them to adopt.

Non-mentalizing social roles foster social stereotypes and perservative robotic group

behavior that fails to recognize and mentalize the individual-in-the-group, for example,

the fighting behavior of cultist religious groups, eg Twemlow & Hough, In Press 2006.

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Bystanders involved with the process in a non-mentalizing social system and

precisely through projective identification are able to experience themselves as more

coherent and complete by retaining the libidinal aspects of the aggression and projecting

the sadistic/aggressive aspects into the victim and victimizer. Thus the pain and suffering

of the object of the prejudice never needs to be represented as a mental state in the

bystanders’ consciousness.

As psychoanalytic theorizing has shifted from a one-person to a two-person

psychology, the role of the bystander as we propose it has created an inevitable pressure

to shift further to a “three-person psychology.” represented by the culture of both real

people and cultural myths and stories and customs.. In this way individuals not directly

involved with the event, affect the two person and the one person psychology

collectively.

The bystander may abdicate their role both helpfully and unhelpfully. Case 1

involves an example of how the bystanders’ helpful role helped to ameliorate violence in

an elementary school system. Besides these phenomena, group dynamics has an

immense effect on how the bystander and the victim and victimizer can exist in a group

as a whole and function under the pressure of large and small group dynamics. Although

not a major focus of this presentation, the matter of small and large dynamics obviously

has a major effect on whether or not there can be positive or negative outcomes to an

interaction that may be the cause of a particular form of prejudice.

Thus the bystander, victim, and victimizer exist in the culture of a group and the

way in which that group as a whole may influence the expression of the prejudice, needs

to be taken into account. Other major influences that appear in different types of large

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groups include propaganda, which uses demonization of the “out-group, to make it

difficult to change the prejudicial atmosphere.

In a large group, one’s individuality is subjugated to the large group leadership

and thus mentalizing the individual is difficult for those who are caught up in a strong

large group effect, even if they have the desire to be helpful or when the large group

identity does not meld with their own. For example, the role of the individual in

Germany during the Nazi era, where numerous individual examples suggest that

discomfort with the delusional and sadistic Nazi ideology was very difficult, even for

well-educated, intelligent, and self-aware individuals to resist.

Case One

An Inner City Elementary School With Racial Issues And Significant Violence.

Twelve years ago we began an experiment in schools designed to see if a

mentalizing school system could be developed with balanced power dynamics and to see

what sort of a system it would become. The first seven years of the study involved

piloting and refining interventions and the result are reported in Twemlow, et al 2001,

Twemlow, Fonagy and Sacco 2002, Twemlow, 2000. The inciting incident that led to

our study was the attempted rape of a second grade girl by several second grade boys, in

a school with the highest out-of-school suspension rate in the school district and the

poorest academic performance. Now it is a model school with the lowest suspension rate,

and the only school in the region where African-American students academically

outperform white students.

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The school of 250 students was located in a very poor area with high incidence of

gun violence and unemployment. The student body was composed of approximately

50% minorities; was predominately black, with about 75% of Caucasians and minorities,

supported by welfare with 50% , single-parent families. The details of the intervention

are extensively described elsewhere (Twemlow, et al, 2005 a & b). In summary the

intervention addressed power dynamics through the use of positive climate campaigns

and other skills training supporting the emergence of helpful natural leaders (see Table

2), called “helpful bystanders.” These helpful bystanders, whose evolving role

encouraged the development of group skills and techniques to handle bullying, fostered

wide support for kindness and helpfulness as values with higher social status, rather than

the macho power of the bully dynamic. We realized that this change was taking hold

when we would hear reports that the program was being described as “stupid” by the

older bully children, a response to feeling disempowered. These natural helpers emerged

largely through the demands of the program itself, and fit criteria as in Table 2. They

enabled a shift in the power dynamics of the school towards a form of pragmatic helpful

altruism, replacing a narcissistic or unduly competitive dynamic. This shift emphasized

collaborative problem solving and non-blaming attitudes. The helpfulness ideal was

reinforced and the bullies and purveyors of prejudice were marginalized, to everyone’s

benefit. The social context created a means to keep the social roles flexible and to make

it easy for children to move in and out of social roles in the power dynamic. Labeling

and demonizing were reduced, and flexible social roles came to dominate the school

culture.

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INSERT TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE

Although this intervention did not in any way directly address racial prejudice, teachers

and students spontaneously noted that racial issues, including taunting and bullying

around racial issues had significantly ameliorated during the course of the study.

In line with our theory of causation of prejudice, addressing the power dynamic

ameliorated the threat from the object of prejudice since a mutually satisfying working

environment became possible for the children. One substudy of 296 students involved in

the later randomized trial, (Dill, et al, 1994) showed that bullying and peer rejection

contributed to children being socially withdrawn and depressed. A subset of victimized

children eventually views the aggression inflicted on them as deserved and legitimate,

later exhibiting externalizing (conduct disordered and bullying) behaviors, suggestive of

the mindset of the avenging victim.

Other analyses (Gamm, et al, in preparation), showed that classrooms with higher

teacher adherence to the program, produced children with a reduction in the attitude that

aggression is a legitimate way to resolve problems, and who also showed less of a decline

in empathy for victims. That teachers are role models for non-prejudicial attitudes is no

surprise. Unfortunately our culture has institutionalized bullying prejudices, which no

doubt dramatically affect our children, through poor adult role models. For example,

excommunication by churches, which can lead to job loss in certain communities,

blacklisting by unions and other groups, exclusive memberships in country clubs, hazing

in colleges and universities, and violence in competitive sports where winning is

overvalued.

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This intervention was later validated in a randomized controlled trial involving

3,600 children in nine elementary schools (Fonagy, et al, 2004, Fonagy, et al submitted).

Results showed decreased peer reported victimization (p< .01), aggression (p< .05), and

aggressive (bully) bystanding (p < .05), compared to control schools. Children also

showed less of a decline in empathy for victims compared to control conditions (p< .01).

There were also highly significant decreases in off task behaviors observed in classrooms

(p < .001), as well as disruptive behavior (p< .001). These improvements were

maintained in the follow-up year. Highly significant improvement in academic

performance was seen in children who had spent two or more years in Peaceful Schools

program schools (Fonagy, et al, 2004).

Case 2 Jamaica: A Violent Culture and a Daunting Challenge

Jamaica offers an opportunity to explore the dimensions of this issue within a

social context that is very different than that of an evolved nation such as the United

States or a European Union member country. Jamaica was born of war; the early

freedom fighters fought against British colonialism with a Jamaican-African population

suffering some of the most oppressive slavery ever experienced in a British colony. From

its beginning, Jamaica has been in fight-flight mode, crisis oriented, anti-intellectual, and

non-mentalizing. Local guerilla wars between the African slaves who escaped to the

mountains, raged throughout the 1700s. The uprising throughout the 19th century against

British rule produced limited self-government for the slave, who had been emancipated in

1834. Jamaica became a crown colony shortly after that, and the ruling elite were and

still are mainly white and mostly British. The current retiring prime minister, P.J.

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Patterson, is the first dark skinned Jamaican elected to that role . In 1962 the oppression

abated, when British Colonial rule came to an end and Jamaica became an independent

nation. There was a reactive reorganization of trade unions and other democratic rights

were aggressivelydemanded, which had been previously suppressed by the British.

Symptomatic of this rejection of oppression was a brief but disastrous liaison with the

Cuban government, which resulted in many wealthy citizens leaving, mainly to the U.S.,

most never returning. Jamaica soon established its current form of parliamentary

democracy, but has never been able to achieve economic stability or reduce violence and

organized crime. Since tourism is its main industry the violence has had a disastrous

economic impact. Although Jamaican women could not be considered in any way passive

(20% of the Jamaican police force are female, compared to less than 5% in the U.S.),

Jamaican men control them in a dehumanizing way, considered necessary to keep women

under control. “You wants some cuts, or need a thumpin” is a threat if a wife or girlfriend

is not behaving as a man would like. In a survey of Jamaican police men and women

(Twemlow & Sacco, 1999), a remarkably high percentage—39% of male and 11% of

female police officers—consider rape to be impossible in a marriage, since a wife was a

wife and owed sex to her husband, regardless of her personal wishes.

Jamaicans are markedly homophobic; many Jamaican musicians have suffered

international censure for their open denigration of gay people. The overall culture

supports aggression toward the “bhatis” and “sodomites” (gay men and women.).

Corporal punishment is encouraged at home and in school and children are sometimes

severely disciplined. While Jamaicans view education and crime (marijuana farming,

part-time prostitution, tourist scams) as a way out of poverty, and will demur to coercive

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authority they are overall very difficult to get to follow social protocols, such as work

rules. Incest and prostitution of children is not uncommon, with a father professing rights

over the eldest daughter, especially if his wife has denied him sex. Overall these features

of the Jamaican society contrast starkly with the peaceful Christian and indigenous

Rastafarian religions, and the fun loving, care free, and welcoming attitude to visitors,

seen in the tourist havens.

Jamaica is now more violent than it was in the 1990s; it has the second highest

homicide rate in the world. Samms-Vaughan, et al, 2004, conducted a self report,

anonymous questionnaire survey of 1,674, 11-12 year old urban, Jamaican children.

Thirty-seven percent of surveyed children had lost a family member or close friend to

murder. Their most common experience of violence was at school. Twenty-five percent

of the children had experienced robbery, shooting, and gang wars. Violence is open and

rampant, as is stigmatization and prejudice. In spite of an extraordinary proliferation of

religions, altruism and gentleness are seen as weaknesses to the average Jamaican

We first began working in Jamaica in 1992 on a project to reduce the homicide

rate in a mid-sized tourist city there (Twemlow et al 1994). The police were targeted as a

primary causal element in the evolution of this violent community. Since Jamaica is a

racially and religiously homogeneous culture, the nature of prejudice easily found its way

into power differences in class, skin shade, and gender. Our interventions targeted the

police as an essential community stabilizing system and involved them in 100 hours of

training, designed to reduce needless violence and corruption and promote altruism. The

intervention team overcame the prejudices of the Jamaican Police Force] against

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foreigners telling them what to do. Practical police skills and public advocacy for the

well being of police were used to strengthen this arm of the community.

We have recently begun new work in schools in Western Jamaica intended to

enhance mentalizing and to reduce violence and prejudice, beginning with two

elementary schools in a coastal town. Each of these K-8 schools has approximately 500

children. Classrooms often hold 70 or more children with few rooms with fans, or air

conditioning, three children for each desk (designed to hold two), minimal school books

and equipment, and no public transportation to help children get to school. Jamaican

teachers are trained in the British method at a Teacher’s College and are remarkably

dedicated and well educated and also quite defensive about their schools. Pointing out

problems is seen as a challenge to their strength and resourcefulness, a response that

surprised us and led to a deeper investigation of this defensiveness. We found that the

veneer of toughness (we can put up with anything, it doesn’t bother us) shared by adults

and children hides a deep insecurity and increasing hopelessness about improvement

A questionnaire was given to 201 3rd, 5th, and 6th grade students in a rural

Jamaican school. This baseline study precedes an intervention derived and adapted from

the U.S. school project, whose goal is to increase mentalization and reduce power

dynamics with the hope that prejudice and violence will also decrease in the school. The

extent of the problem is dramatically illustrated in the figures below comparing this

sample of Jamaican children with a sample from Brazil and from the U.S. Jamaican

children report a great deal more victimization, suicidal thoughts and actions, bully

bystanding, racial prejudice, and teasing about clothing and being overweight than

children in either of the other two countries. This was especially startling because of the

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homogeneous racial composition in Jamaica. Since everyone is mostly dark skinned, the

prejudice shifted to “shades” of darkness rather than black and white. Jamaican school

children all wear uniforms. The attention of prejudice shifted to what parents provide

such as shoes, snacks, and the availability of educational materials, all considered

elements of status. There is no separation of church and state in Jamaica and all children

begin their day with a school wide “Devotion,” which stresses religious ideas of peace

and harmony.

INSERT FIGURES 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, AND 6 ABOUT HERE

When these findings were discussed with teachers there surfaced an angry denial

of their validity, based to some extent on the sense that the children don’t have the

capacity to form opinions and only answer to please or shock adults. The extraordinary

degree of taunting and mean competitiveness observed in the schools is masked by the

apparent cheerfulness of the children, who act meanly while smiling and laughing. In

discussing some of these issues with both children and adults under less defensive

conditions, we found that in Jamaica to be able to tolerate ridicule and adversity is a sign

of strength and has high social status, similar to the “mother game” of U.S. ghetto

children.

To convert this obviously malignant prejudice into everyday prejudice may seem

to require a sea change in the cultural attitude, which some might consider socially

impossible. Our work, however, has a less grandiose focus; we will help these two

schools to become model schools so children could have a different experience of school

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life. We offer teachers a reason to model non-prejudicial and coercive patterns of

behavior. This approach does not involve the central administration of schools; instead it

is locally based and narrowly focused. The Internet is the tool we use to stimulate

mentalization in teachers and students. Increased mentalization will be reinforced using

access to the Internet and the addition of small amounts of resources to increase school

morale. Teacher training and involvement in List Serves with other progressive

educational professionals are planned interventions. Experience in the U.S. is that such

positive school experiences can be taken into the community at large and have a lasting

effect over a larger sample of the population. The fight-flight stance of the school as a

microcosm of Jamaican society can shift when teachers mentalize, reflect, and model

non-prejudicial patterns of thinking and behaving.

The intense pressure of poverty and high level of violence makes Jamaica an ideal

place to study the process of change in attitudes related to malignant prejudice. Schools

are where many children go to feel safe and protected. Teachers are role models who

assist children in forming non-prejudicial attitudes, often despite the fact that many of the

children will return to homes and communities steeped in prejudicial thinking. Change in

the rough culture of Jamaica is a daunting task. These small projects are designed to

study and create a process of awareness and change in the underlying dynamics that

impact the development of prejudice in children living in difficult social environments in

an evolving nation. If a small intervention shows promise under these circumstances,

with little financial investment, there may be hope for replication in more evolved nations

whose schools are similarly soaked in social aggression and violence.

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Case 3 Prejudice in a Wealthy Suburban U.S. City

In the third case, we will explore a diametrically different social context than

Jamaica. This city of a 100,000 people borders a larger city and was one of several with

a village manager/ trustees form of government, which operated with a prideful

efficiency in their schools. Our consultation addressed the problem of mounting school

bullying and social aggression. This community was aware of the escalating problem and

gathered a cross-section of the community to explore ways of stemming the development

of violence in their city. The consultation identified a pattern in the community of

prejudice based on everyday issues including academic success, popularity, and social

inclusion. Parents were obsessed with the places their children occupied in the social and

achievement hierarchies of the school and community. This prejudice seemed harmless

enough but was identified by us as a time bomb for the possibility of more serious

violence later, if not addressed.

This city had a profile typical of this pattern of the ideal community bereft of

impurities: the average real estate price was in the $500,000 dollar range; violent crime

was low, but burglary, robbery, and theft rates were very high. This community had only

a 2% minority population, primarily Asian and most came from affluent business

families. The schools did not provide services for the learning disabled, behaviorally

disturbed, and educable mentally retarded children, who were sent to schools in other

cities if they needed such services. The city ordinances had created an environment in

which all who lived there were affluent and racially homogenous. In some respects the

city is not to be blamed for following a theory of peace and harmony with a certain

common sense appeal: If you shut out impurities you will not become contaminated, not

21

unlike the simplistic philosophy behind executing killers, who will of course never kill

again. Such theories of community stability are rooted in prejudiced and erroneous

assumptions that social research calls into question. For example community diversity,

including intelligence, skill, and economic prosperity, has been shown to improve the

stability and viability of communities.

Prejudice in the schools was overt; the Asian population ate in a separate part of

the cafeteria and the school provided specially prepared Asian food in an attempt to retain

cultural uniqueness for the children. This served to reinforce established malignant

prejudice. This separation was not imposed by adults but allowed to happen by them as

abdicating bystanders. The students staked out areas for “Asians” and “Whites” to park

and the cafeteria was divided along Asian/non-Asian lines.

We recommended the schools begin prejudice focus groups and programs in the

primary grades to increase awareness of power struggles and how they evolved at school.

Further, we recommended that a program be initiated to help students from this protected,

economically enriched community learn how to engage in meaningful contact and shared

activities with less privileged youth in the surrounding large cities. The consultation

recommendations to the village manager and board of trustees were never followed,

although the village manager kept in touch with us in a way that indicated he would like

to work with us, but we were considered too soft by the politically influential trustees.

For example we suggested trying to understand prejudice rather than punish it

Three years later, the city made international headlines when a high school hazing

incident, fueled by parent-provided alcohol, at a football game erupted into a videotaped

melee of savage beatings and disgusting behaviors involving animal entrails and fecal

22

material. One school board member, in a classic abdicating bystander mode, said, “This

gathering was a football game 23 years ago, and it was abolished by the school because it

got a little too rough. Each year, the school would try to keep its ear to the ground and

find out what was happening. It usually succeeded. This year, for the first time in

memory, the school was unaware of the exact date of the event. We found out later that

the kids with cell phones and pagers had a little information network, and many kids

didn't know the time and location until as late as 20 minutes before the event. How could

the school find out if it's on a Sunday, late in the morning when the kids are not even in

the school's care and haven't been for a couple of days?"1

Concluding Observations

We have enumerated a psychodynamic theory of prejudice, which we feel arises

before more abruptly destructive forms, from the crucible of everyday, more benign

prejudices rooted in struggles for power and avoidance of threat, thus affording

opportunity for preventive actions.

In such a setting then, a relatively common prejudice or personal preference can

be adaptive, harmless, and can encourage healthy competition. When fanned by the

flames of the bystanding audience, who gain voyeuristic satisfaction in the pain of others

and in doing so abdicate their duty to offer solutions, together with the addition of

coercion and humiliation, such everyday prejudice can become malignant, fragmenting

collective group identity into small narcissistic self-seeking sub groups without a

collective sense of community. A sense of rootedness is lost, a fight-flight group

assumption dominates, and the leaders lack foresight and capacity to plan for the future.

1 Chris Hernandez, May 8, 2003, CBS, Chicago.

23

We give three case examples that illustrate, first, a way of dealing with prejudice

in school children that fosters hopefulness. Natural leaders, who eliminate coercion and

humiliation from the climate by altering the social status of power, making the roles of

victim and victimizer more flexible, facilitate this hopefulness. A second case in which a

country born in an atmosphere of prejudice and lethal conflict and ruled for centuries in a

dictatorial way, attempts to emerge from the fight-flight mode of thinking. The country

faces massive hurdles, since prejudice and violence are conditioned into its cultural

mores, which are then transmitted to its children. A third example is offered of the way

in which a city evolves its own solution to a problem, by eliminating deviance from an

affluent Caucasian norm, with an unstated theory that this purity will be maintained if

sufficient barriers against the impurities can be erected . A theory that eventually comes

back to haunt the city fathers.

24

Table 1

Bystander

Everyday Prejudice

Role flexibility Mentalizing

Ego adaptive

Maintenance of the collectiv

Social speciation Competition enhances excell Aggression No dominant group assumpti

Malignant Prejudice

Role fixation

+ Coercion + Humiliation

e group

ence

on

Non-mentalizing Ego Destructive

Destroys the collective group Pseudospeciation

Competition fuels the hatred Violence Fight-Flight assumption dominates

25

Table 2

Defining Natural Leaders*

Healthy Charisma 1) Non-cutting sense of humor that connects and empathizes with peers to encourage their autonomy and participation. 2) Sanguine ability to empathize with peers in a way that helps Self and others. 3) Creativity applied to leadership that promotes creativity in group projects and in individual group members. 4) Charismatic leader’s personal needs are met by benevolent reaching out to challenge the peer group to connect with their community via helpful projects and activities. 5) This leader reaches out to foster and mentor positive leaders in younger grade level children modeling future leaders.

*Peter A. Olsson, M.D, personal communication

Unhealthy Charisma

1) Cutting, sarcastic, cold-aloof humor that puts down or victimizes peers.

2) Empathy that largely promotes the Self above others and eventually at their expense or harm.

3) Creativity that promotes destructive sub-groups that cause isolation or alienation from the larger group.

4) Charismatic leader’s personal needs or psychopathology is deepened by efforts to dominate the peer group.

5) This type of leader bullies or puts down younger aspiring leaders so as to maintain his or her fiefdom.

26

Cross Cultural Survey*

* Survey developed by Eric M. Vernberg, PhD. Data analysis by Eric M. Vernberg, PhD. & Brian J. Noland

The following charts represent comparisons between three sample populations: • Jamaican 3rd, 5th, and 6th graders (n=201) • Brazilian 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders (n=295) • American 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders (n=97)

27

Figures 1 & 2

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

Jam aica Br azil Am e r ica

Per

cent

of S

tud

ents

Rep

orti

ngW

eekl

y O

vert

Vic

tim

izat

ion

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

Jam aica Br azil A m e r ica

Per

cent

of S

tud

ents

Rep

ort

inA

ggr

essi

ve B

ysta

ndin

gHow Many Students Report Frequent Overt Victimization?

How Many Students Report Frequent Aggressive Bystanding?

28

Figure 3

Race: Percentage of students who said kids at school make fun of kids of other colors or races “most times” or “always.” Clothing: Percentage of students who said kids who don’t wear the right clothes are left out or teased “most times” or “always.” Weight: Percentage of students who said kids at school make fun of heavy kids “most times” or “always.”

01020304050607080

Jamaica Brazil America

RaceClothingWeight

29

Thought: I thought about hurting myself Plan: I made a plan to hurt myself Tried: I tried to hurt myself

Fig 4,5,6

Thought

Jamaica

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Never Once 2 times 3 +

BrazilAmerica

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Never Once 2 times 3 +

BrazilAmerica

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Never Once 2 times 3 +

BrazilAmerica

Plan Tried

JamaicaJamaica

30

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